Listicles promoting “the top” or “best of” with your own product at the top are getting crushed in search, which shows that cheap tricks are a waste of time, budget and trust
You’ve seen those listicles. The ones where a technology company lists “the top” or “the best” tools in any given industry. The catch is they list their own tool – and usually at the top.
It’s self-aggrandizing and off-putting. Most people avoid talking to people who are full of themselves. That extends to businesses, too, and to the best of my knowledge, it’s still people who buy software.
Undoubtedly, this perception comes from my roots in PR. Who would you trust more: the software company that says they are the best – or a customer review, analyst report or independent article that does? That’s the same classical distinction in approaches between PR and advertising.
Even so, we can understand why a company succumbs to the temptation to compile a listicle and slap its name at the top. Up until now, they’ve ranked in search, and more importantly to marketers, they get regurgitated by AI. In other words, when a user prompts AI for the best tools in a given category, such listicles are likely to rank.
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But that may well be changing, according to Search Engine Land, based on some quick evaluations by Amsive VP of SEO Strategy and Research Lily Ray. She analyzed websites that had dozens, or even hundreds in some cases, of these self-aggrandizing listicles and found that search traffic has dropped noticeably:
“In multiple cases, organic visibility dropped 30% to 50% within weeks. The losses were not domain-wide. They were concentrated in blog, guide, and tutorial subfolders.”
This will likely have an impact on AI search tools. For example, ChatGPT is reportedly reliant on Google search results to provide its own answers:
“Presumably, these drops in Google organic results will also impact visibility across other LLMs that leverage Google’s search results, which extends beyond Google’s ecosystem of AI search products like Gemini and AI Mode [and AI Overviews], but is also likely to include ChatGPT,” Ray wrote.
It wasn’t just the listicles that were getting hit, but other shady SEO practices intended to game search rankings:
“Self-promotional listicles likely weren’t the only factor impacting organic visibility. Many affected sites also showed signs of rapid content scaling, automation, aggressive year-based refreshes, and other tactics tied to algorithmic risk.”
In other words, what’s getting crushed is synthetic attempts to trick search engines, AI tools, and ultimately people. And that’s the way it ought to be. This was entirely predictable.
The secret to good marketing is that there are no shortcuts. Marketing is hard because distrust is the default mode of your target audience – because of tactics like self-aggrandizing listicles. It takes knowledge to understand the market, focus, effort, and trial and error over time.
It’s a fool’s errand to pursue cheap and cheerful tactics. Unfortunately, if the SEO games of the last 20 years are any indication, AI visibility is just the start of a whole new game of whac-a-mole.
On the other hand, the technology is advancing rapidly, so your chances of getting caught, penalized and being set back many months, is a real risk.
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